Abstract
The chapter introduces the most important concept of Uexküll’s thought: the idea of the environment (Umwelt) as subjective world. Through the analysis of the first edition of Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere and of the article Die Umwelt, the chapter shows how (according to Uexküll) each animal species constitutes around itself a different subjective world, which (with an increasing order of complexity) can be composed of isolated stimuli, combinations and synthesis of stimuli, unitary objects, the functions of the objects, etcetera. The chapter also outlines two central themes of Uexküll’s theory, which will be examined later: the presence, in each Umwelt, of a felt and an unfelt part, and the cognitive relation between the Umwelt and the external reality.
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Notes
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Which would be well-understood by Plessner, who in one citation from the second edition of Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere would make a significant contribution in brackets: “Functions simply make a chain that goes through the inner world (i.e. the body!)” (Plessner 1975: 249; Plessner quotes from von Uexküll 1921: 177).
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Georges John Romanes (1848–1894). Canadian physiologist and biologist close to Darwin, in his 1882 book Animal Intelligence – which, despite a certain lack of scientific rigor, was widely circulating and influenced later ethology – attempted to demonstrate the presence of intelligence in a large number of animal behaviors (Romanes 1882).
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Uexküll does not go so far as to affirm that there is no relation between the physiological processes (those cerebral most importantly) and the emergence of quality and psychic phenomena; a relation exists, “even if it is not of a causal nature” (von Uexküll 1900: 500). On Uexküll’s stance on animal psychology, cf. Bassanese 2004: 60.
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In Die Umwelt Uexküll draws an explicit methodological indication: “We have absolutely no right to affirm that the world of our sense organs is the animals’ world. On the contrary, every animal lives in a world specific to it, different from that of its neighbours. We must, therefore, speak of countless “environments”, amongst which the world surrounding us is only an isolated case, which should not be considered normative” (von Uexküll 1910a: 639; italics by Uexküll).
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On the terminological and conceptual passage from milieu to Umwelt in philosophical and scientific terminology, as well as Uexküll’s role in this, see Canguilhem 2008: 98–121.
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This formula, which is so pregnant in its conciseness, is taken up again by Uexküll in later works. He does so anytime it is necessary to underline the difference between the organisation of inferior and superior animals. See for example A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: “Of all the various things located in its surroundings, its environment only ever admits the same perceptive mark through which the paramecium, when stimulated, is caused to flee. The same perceptive mark, hindrance, always brings forth the same movement of flight” (von Uexküll 2010: 73).
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Elise Hanel was a German zoologist active in the early twentieth century. She studied the behavior of the earthworm in relation to Darwin’s work. She also studied the reproductive process of the freshwater polyp.
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Karl Ritter von Frisch (1886–1982). Austrian ethologist who in 1973 received the Nobel prize for medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaus Tinbergen. The passage cited by Uexküll comes from the 1927 work The Dancing Bees (von Frisch 1954); the quote from Frisch testifies to the attention that Uexküll paid to nascent ethology.
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As it is pertinent we shall take an expression used by Merleau-Ponty, who in his presentation on Uexküll’s contributions to contemporary natural philosophy distinguishes between environment “for the behavior of an animal” and environment “for its consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 166); Merleau-Ponty demonstrates how for Uexküll the species-specific environment was the integration of these two elements, and how also in the first type of environment the characteristic of meaningfulness is phenomenologically present.
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The reference to the hand of man puts Uexküll in a long line of thought that – from Aristotle to Gehlen – sees manuality as one of the characteristic traits of the human being.
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Karl Camillo Schneider (1867–1943). Austrian zoologist, worked in the zoological stations of Naples and Rovinj. Professor of zoology at the University of Vienna from 1905 to 1932, where he initially dedicated himself to histological and anatomical research, then later to animal psychology, anthropology and parapsychology.
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In Chap. 7 we shall see the reception of this feature of this Uexküllian concept on the part of authors such as Cassirer and Langer (cf. below, 188–197).
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On the concept of impact in mechanical theories of environment and behavior and its Cartesian origin see G. Canguilhem 2008: 186.
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Emanuel Rádl (1873–1942). Czechoslovakian biologist and philosopher, he was interested in the central nervous system and the phenomenon of animal phototropism; his interests in theoretical biology and the philosophy of nature focused on Goehte, Leibniz and Stahl. In the 1910s he obtained a certain notoriety thanks to his publication Geschichte der biologischen Theorien seit dem Ende der siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Rádl 1905–1909). After World War I he became a university professor and his interests shifted towards political philosophy, specifically the relationship between religion and politics.
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Brentari, C. (2015). The Subjective World of the Umwelt. In: Jakob von Uexküll. Biosemiotics, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9688-0_4
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